WordPress Administration Panel WordPress Plugins

Admin Themes can be designed manually by changing the /wp-admin/wp-admin.css stylesheet with changes ranging from complex to simple colors, or by using a WordPress Plugin called an Admin Theme Plugin. Some just change the look of the Admin Panels (the “skin”), while others add more options and features.

For information on how to create or change the look of the WordPress Administration Panels, see Creating Admin Themes in the WordPress Codex, the online manual for WordPress Users.

Here are some WordPress Admin Themes to try out on your WordPress blog, and I’ve also included some WordPress Plugins to add drop down menus and other features to your Administration Panels.

WordPress Admin Themes

The most popular Administration Panel Plugin is WP-Tiger-Admin Plugin. It creates a clean and simple layout for the Admin Panels with easy tab navigation on the side not the top, and everything is in an easy to read format and structure.

SpotMilk, Admin Theme for WordPress features an interesting and clean look with a new WordPress logo design and spotlight-styled header image. There are new main and sub-menus, helping to put like items together. The boxy look is gone and there are new forms and fancy buttons.

The X-Dashboard for WordPress was very popular. It allowed you to customize how your WordPress Admin Panels and Dashboard section from within itself or by adding new X-Dashboard Modules. I’m not sure if it works with the latest version of WordPress.

WordPress Administration Panel Enhancements

Don’t want to change your Admin Panels totally? There are some other options you can add to enhance your WordPress Administration Panels.

For those who like the blue admin bar that registered WordPress.com bloggers see, you can host your own admin bar on your blog, viewable only by registered users and contributors.

The following WordPress Plugins create Admin Bars, putting the key admin panel tabs right at the top of your screen for easy access and control. Most of these are also customizable, allowing you to set which menu tabs you want in the bar.

Hate clicking through the tabs to get to what you want? The WordPress Plugin Admin Drop Down Menu creates a drop down menu so you can slide your mouse from a tab to a sub tab and then choose which one you want. Instead of three clicks to get to somewhere, it now takes a little mouse movement and one click.

Want an even cleaner Admin Panel interface? Mark Jaquith’s Clutter Free WordPress Plugin allows you to choose which elements of the Write Post panel you want to see or not see, streamlining the look.

Semiologic’s Admin Simplified also allows you to remove much of the unwanted or often unused elements in the WordPress Administration Panels, including the excerpts, custom fields, and more.

The Custom Admin Menu Plugin gives you control over how the WordPress Admin Panel tags are set and ordered. You can change the label name of any menu itme, create nested sub-menus, and move any panel to a top-level page or child-level, rearranging as you want and need.

18 Comments

Especially for the getting rid of the post preview plugin, thanks. Somehow (I’m guessing messing with my .htacess stuff) I made it so it shows whatever is on the front page at the moment, not the post I’m working on.

Since I never use it anyway for blog anyway, this will be a great plugin to get rid of what I’ve essentially made a useless feature.

They “should”. There have been some changes to the wp-admin.css in the latest version, so it might not be as “clean” a switch as you might like. Check with the author to see if they have a WordPress 2.1 version.

Great list. I think sometimes that admin plugins are overlooked by many people, and most WP bloggers don’t realize that the Dashboard can be tweaked, modded, and completely retrofitted to make work so much easier.

I with that WordPress would work out different dashboards for different scenarios – like working as a team, a daily poster, semi-often poster, a video blogger, photoblogger, company blogger, etc – kind of like the way Macromedia first made Fireworks and Dreamweaver, and the first time you ran it asked questions like “are you a coder, are you a designer, etc…”

Now with wordpress 2.5 and the new admin panel out though, I think not many of them will still be working.

Anyway, I was running some client sites that really needed a uniform look in and out of the admin panel and so I developed my own 2.5 plugin.

It’s called Qwerty Admin Panel Theme and it is based on the 2.5 admin. It’s got an extensive color selection screen in the Design menu that allows you to change the colors to anything you like, and also it swaps the panel images so you can place your own and links your site’s /favicon.ico to display on the admin panel as well.

It might not be as fancy as some of the other plugins here, but it was made with future compatibility in mind — It works fine with 2.5 and (in it’s default state) it’s only changing color information. So even in the case of another major reconstruction of the admin panel it’s not going to be hard to bring up to date.

Anyway, I was hoping you might be interested to feature it here, or post some feedback back at the plugin page. I’d be very interested to hear what you have to say.

I don’t know how a daily or semi-often “poster” blogger would need something different as it is better to have consistency so no matter which blog you are working on, the parts are in the same place. The same with the other types of bloggers.

WordPress is highly flexible and there are a number of Plugins, as you read here, that will add all kinds of goodies to the interface. I don’t think WordPress should put such things in the core as it just bulks things up and they are working very hard to keep it fast loading.

Hi Lorelle,
I am looking for a plugin that would allow me to sort pending posts by author/contributor. I know you can click on the authors name and see all posts by that author but I was looking for something that allows you to see sort it that way in the initial post page. Also Is there a plugin that adds a publish option in the pending posts list without having to go into the post
Thanks

Hi lorelle, as a newbie I am absolutely confused with all this jargon. Guess its going to take me a while to grasp. In the meanwhile though I would like to monetize my wordpress with an infolinks plugin. Would you please tell me in dummies language, how to do it? It would be much appreciated.
Best regards,

You cannot monetize a WordPress.com site. You will have to get a site set up with a web host and use the self-hosted version of WordPress. I don’t know what “infolinks” are but it sounds annoying. I do not offer monetization help. There are thousands of sites that do, though take most of it with a grain of salt, sugar, mustard, and every other condiment as they serve up a quick solution that will probably hurt you in the end.

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[…] covered a lot of different WordPress Plugins that will help you manage your multi-blogger blog in Plugins for the WordPress Administration Panels and WordPress Plugins To Help You Administer Your […]